Blogroll

Do you know that in 2004, “blog” was classified as the “word of the year” in the MerriamWebster dictionary? That there are over 200,000,000 blogs? But where did this blog idea started? I believe that there are many debates over who was the first blogger.

It is not an easy question. You can’t just, say, look who wrote the first blog in 1997. It’s somewhat more complex than that.

We have Justin Hall who in 1994 started to share deep details of his life on his personal website, links.net. At this time, we didn’t have the term “blog”. However, what his site was doing is pretty much what you see on blogs nowadays.

Then we have Jorn Barn, another person who had a big influenced in the blogosphere. He created the term “weblog” after playing around with the words web, link, list, and log. The name was to describe the process of “logging the web”. Peter Merholz later shortened the term “weblog” to “blog”.

In addition, I need to mention Dave Winer, the author of one of the oldest blogs, “Scripting News”. He also offered free blog hosting on his site. Winer once said, “Everyone gets their own personal website. I want to help you do this.”

After all, it is complicated to say who the first blogger was. Looking to all these guys you easily see that all of them contributed to the existence of blogs. I vote for all of them as the first bloggers.